Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Well,
it’s happened again. Got an email about a Foo Fighter sighting at the end of
World War II which was radar confirmed. The ship, the USS New York apparently fired on the object without results which
meant that they neither hit it nor drove it away. This all happened in the
middle of March, 1945, sometime after the invasion of Iwo Jima and before the
invasion of Okinawa.

USS New York in 1945.

According
to the story, as told in several sources, it was about one o’clock in the
afternoon when the captain of the New
York sounded general quarters. While the crew searched the sky for the
attack, down in the ship’s CIC the radar seemed to show a single object. It was
then that the crew, including the captain sighted a bright, silver object
overhead, seeming to follow the ship. According to Keith Chester’s Strange Company, the captain ordered his
anti-aircraft batteries to open fire but there were no results. When it was
clear that they were unable to engage the light, the captain ordered a
cease-fire. “Within seconds,” according to Chester which, of course, means the
witness, “… the object climbed up at fantastic speed until it was out of sight
and off the radar scope.”

Not
exactly a disk-shaped object but it happened more than two years before Arnold,
and there was the hint of radar confirmation. The witness, eventually
identified as Donald Pratt, said that he also had seen the report in a magazine
(he thought it was “The Times” meaning
Time, I suppose, but it was The New Yorker for October 27, 1945 but
more on that later).

I
haven’t done a very good job of describing this sighting, but only because it
was a non-event. Oh the sighting happened and the New York opened fire, but the target was a bright light in the sky
without a distinct shape and was way out of range of any of the anti-aircraft
artillery on the ship.

According
to the NICAP website, there is another side to this event, which does not
negate what Pratt told researchers, only that the identity of the object was
realized by the ship’s navigator sometime after the firing started. And it
probably should be pointed out here that by this time, meaning March 1945, the
US military, many in the civilian government and probably thousands of
civilians knew of the Japanese Balloon Bombs. These were sort of “constant
level balloons” designed to cross the Pacific Ocean, and then after a couple of
cycles of rising and falling, would automatically release a cluster of bombs.
The idea was to set fires in the Pacific Northwest and to cause other sorts of
havoc on a really random game of hit or miss. The balloons did work, to a very
limited extent, but the major fires were never started.

Anyway,
it seems that the captain and crew thought they were looking at one of the
balloon bombs or some other Japanese secret weapon. But, according to Arthur
Criste, who wrote to Patrick Huyghe who had published Chester’s book, he had
been on the ship during the incident and he had a different perspective (pun
intended) of the sighting.

He
wrote, “The object we were firing at that day was the planet Venus. It was
thought to have been a Japanese balloon…”

Okay…

He
continued, “The reason the radar failed to detect a target was due to the fact
of its maximum which was 20,000 yards, well beyond the range of our
anti-aircraft guns (which means in its somewhat convoluted way that the radar
didn’t have the range to detect the object… Venus).”

He
said that when the guns began firing, it woke up the navigator who thought they
were being attacked. He ran topside and looked up. He recognized the object
immediately. He said, “What the hell are you shooting at? That’s Venus…”

Okay…

But
a letter from another sailor does not a solution make. According to The New Yorker, on pages 39 – 40, in a
short article by William McGuire and Mark Murphy, they reported on what a young
sailor had told them. It is essentially the same story but there was no mention
of radar being involved. Sure, it mentioned that it seemed that this luminous
object was following the ship, and the captain asked the gunnery officer for
the range. That man said the object was about eight thousand, eight hundred
yards from the ship. They opened fire but the rounds fell short, so they kept
increasing the size of the weapons brought to bear. The rounds continued to
fall short. Eventually they signaled to one of the destroyers to use their
five-inch guns, but still had no effect on the object.

Finally,
the navigator arrived topside and mentioned that they were firing at Venus. At
that point the shooting stopped… and I wonder what the captain said to the
young officer who told him the object was eight thousand, eight hundred yards
away…but I digress

For
those keeping score at home, Pratt was correct in almost everything he said,
except for the object being first seen on radar and that it seemed to leave the
area when the shooting stopped. The incident was mentioned in a magazine,
though it is clear he had not read the magazine in a long time. Anyway, this
solution seems quite logical to me and there is no reason to argue with it. The
NICAP site contains all the information about this:

This
is just one more example of getting to the final and original sources. Pratt
told his tale which opened the door. Others went through it, but in the end,
once the trail was followed, the logical solution was found. Chester, in his
footnote about the object did mention that there was no documentation for the
sighting (and in fairness to Keith, there are many new resources available
today that he did not have when he put together his book).

Sunday, July 28, 2013

Well,
the great Aztec debate is over and the winner is… Yeah, you’d think that but it
was probably Scott Ramsey. After all, he had immersed himself in the case for
twenty years and was able to divert the conversation into other arenas without
doing much damage to his own point of view. You can listen to the show here:

Take,
for example, this investigation that was apparently launched by the Air Force
Office of Special Investigation into a claim that someone had offered for sale
pictures of the Aztec flying saucer in late 1948. This was clearly a hoax of
some kind because the man offering the pictures, a fellow named Cline,
apparently didn’t exist and was never found. The Army CID and then the AFOSI
were involved which seems to lend some credibility to the tale, but the reality
is, while the military was involved, there was nothing to suggest that the
pictures ever existed and that it seems to have been some sort of con. Just
because Aztec and pictures were mentioned it doesn’t actually prove that
something happened near Aztec.

Ramsey
wrote, “A skeptic might suggest that the photo sting might have been part of a
con game attempting to capitalize on Scully’s best-selling book, but the other
interesting part of history is that Scully’s book was published, not yet on the
booksellers’ shelves when this “sting” took place. If this were some crazy
marketing scheme by Scully, he would surely have made reference to the Aztec
photos in his book, but no such reference is found in the book to photographs
other than the Dr. Gee comments about them.”

There
are several flaws here, the first of which is that the publication date is not
the date the books land in the bookstores. They’re usually there earlier than
the publication date and are often for sale prior to that date.

But
what is overlooked here, and which I didn’t think of while in the debate, is
that Denver, where all this took place, was where Silas Newton, in March 1950,
had made his famous UFO speech at the University of Denver. Newton was talking
about a crash and mentioned specifically that one had fallen within 500 miles
of Denver.

In
fact, according to newspapers and other documents, there had been a lot of
discussion of the UFO crash in the Four Corners area of New Mexico since the
beginning of 1950. In Scully’s book (page 20 of the old hardback), Scully
wrote:

In
fact the night the Denver Post was
exposing Scientist X and the Farmington citizens were exposing Operation
Hush-Hush, I was dining in Hollywood with the man all Denver was hunting for.
He had just talked to George Koehler in Denver by long distance. Koehler had
worked for him and had married his nurse. The Farmington report had set Denver
in an uproar, Koehler told him.

“Do
you remember my telling you,” Scientist X said as he hung up, “that the first
flying saucer was found on a ranch twelve miles from Aztec?”

I
remembered when he reminded me but I had forgotten. “Yes,” I said, “I remember
now.”

“Well,
he said, “Farmington is only twenty-eight miles from that ranch…”

The
point here is that the name of Aztec and details of the crash were being
bandied about many months before Scully’s book came out, and many in the Denver
area were aware of the case. So, a hoax, appearing in Denver in the weeks after
the official publication date of Scully’s book isn’t all that impossible… in
fact, had it been any other city besides Denver, that whole episode might have
greater importance.

Had
I known that this would become an important point in the debate, I would have
been ready for it. Scott chose the ground for the battle and I moved to meet
him, rather than retreating for an advantage. My mistake.

So,
let’s talk about the conman, Silas Newton. Scott said that I had said that when
Newton died 140 claims were filed against his estate. This figure came from
Jerry Clark in his UFOEncyclopedia and he cited Bill Moore as
the source. Scott said that he had only been able to document one of these
claims which, to me, is one too many (though claims filed against an estate are
not all that rare). The suggestion was that the information came from Moore and
therefore was unreliable because Moore, in 1989 had committed UFOlogcial
suicide admitting to various and somewhat unethical activities. Moore was
unreliable. We can ignore what Moore said for that reason and I just wasn’t
going to defend Moore as a researcher, given what I knew about him.

But
the information about Newton being a conman runs far beyond what Moore had said
in 1989. According to J. P. Cahn, Newton had a long history of engaging in
shady activities. In 1931, he was arrested for conspiracy and was later
arrested for larceny, false stock statements, and interstate transportation of
stolen property. He seemed to have a long arrest record, but in many of the cases
had the charges dismissed when Newton made restitution.

Not
exactly a sterling reputation… and one that didn’t seem to end until his death.
So, the information is that there had been 140 claims against his estate, but
nearly all of them dropped when it was learned that he had about $16,000.00 in
assets. I suppose the single case that was left, at least according to Scott,
was the one that wasn’t dropped.

We
talked about the case in Denver in which Newton and GeBauer were on trial for
fraud. They lost the trial but the debate seemed to center on whether this was a
criminal trial or a civil trial, but in the end the distinction isn’t great…
meaning that the judgment went against them. They lost and were forced to pay
restitution and to prove what a sterling character Newton was, he never did
make restitution.

So
the real point wasn’t how many people attempted to have Newton pay them after
Newton died, but that he had a long history of con games.

I
asked Scott if he had ever interviewed Manuel Sandoval, a part-time police
officer from Cuba, New Mexico who had been on the scene. Scott readily admitted
that he hadn’t and that was clear from the book. I have been back through this
book (having not read it for about two years) and I still say that it seems
that he had interviewed Sandoval, given the way the chapters are written. Scott
said it’s clear that the information came from Sandoval’s best friend but if
you read the information starting on page 3, it seems that he is quoting
Sandoval… and he does again later in the book. This point might have been a
little too subtle, and Scott argued that it wasn’t true.

We
talked about the information that came from Donald Bass, known as Sam, which
came by way of Virgil Riggs. I noted that there was no confirmation that Bass
had been killed by a hit and run driver in Vietnam as alleged. Scott said that
the database I used suggested there might be omissions in it, but there is little
room for error. I did check others, but cited only the one. Scott had no
information to refute this only that the one database might have been
incomplete.

Here’s
the problem. Scott wrote that he had Bass’ service number but apparently has
not checked with the Records Center in St. Louis. I sent him the information on
how to access that information but have not heard back. If Bass had been killed
in Vietnam, the St. Louis Records Center would be the final authority on it
because it would be noted in his record. Given that Scott has a service number
for the guy, we can get information about him. This point should be checked.

This
is a minor point, but what I was suggesting was that some of the avenues, some
of the easy ones had not been followed. It would only take a short letter and a
stamp to get the information, but that hasn’t been done. Instead Scott just
said the database might have been incomplete, which doesn’t really advance his
position or validate the claim.

And
while it seemed that the debate went Scott’s way most of the time, I believe
there was one knockout punch I delivered. I asked if Scott had any
documentation for the Aztec crash that preceded Scully’s reports on it. A
newspaper clipping, a diary, a letter, anything with a date that preceded
Scully, but he said he didn’t have anything like that.

That
might be the real game changer. Something, anything, that can be shown to have been
written before Scully released the information, would go a long way to validate
the Aztec crash. At this point there are no newspaper articles, no magazine
reports, and no government documents to show this.

There
were some other points that were made, but not much of substance. I mentioned
that the man who was sheriff in 1947 had said it didn’t happen. Scott countered
that he had talked to the family and well, maybe that wasn’t quite true… I’ll
stick with what Coral Lorenzen had to say when she talked to the sheriff in the
mid-1970s.

I
mean that’s sort of where it all ended. Scott believes there was a crash and I
do not. He is required to prove his case and I am not. He is the one making the
claims of the crash so the burden of proof is on him. I don’t believe he met
that burden, but I do remember the Mogul debate that took place in Roswell in
1997 between Karl Pflock and me. Those who believed Mogul thought Karl had won
and those who did not believed I had won. I don’t know if either one of us
swayed an opinion and it was the same thing here. I don’t think either of us
swayed an opinion.

Monday, July 22, 2013

I’ve
grown tired of this NOTAM game but have to wonder why the skeptics just don’t
attempt to answer the question themselves… and why do they demand that I answer
their questions when they continue to ignore mine? What is this double standard
where all things skeptical are accepted without critical thought but anything
that might suggest an answer they don’t like is attacked?

And
remember what Sherlock Holmes said about the dog that didn’t bark… but more on
that later.

Anyway,
take, for example, the Phil Klass diatribe against Bob Jacobs. Jacobs made a
suggestion that he had been involved in a UFO case now known as the Big Sur UFO
Sighting, and in the course of the discussion mentioned a paper about some
aspect of it. He cited it properly, and provided Klass with all the information
needed for Klass to access the paper himself but that’s not what Klass wanted.
He wanted Jacobs to copy the paper and send the copy to him. Jacobs refused
because, according to Jacobs, he didn’t like the tone of Klass’ letter to him.
So, Klass sent a letter to Jacobs’ bosses making all sorts of allegations.
We’ve explored all that before (see this blog on September 11, 2011), but the
point is how Klass seemed to believe that Jacobs owed him the paper.

And
now we have a similar situation about the requirements of NOTAMs for the Mogul
flights. Make no mistake; this flap over NOTAMs is another red herring by the
skeptical side. They demand that I supply them with NOTAMs for Mogul Flights
No. 5 and 6. But it really makes no difference what those NOTAMs might have
said because the issue is the NOTAM for Flight No. 4 and not those for other,
later flights. What did Flight No. 4’s NOTAM say or not say is irrelevant since
there was no NOTAM issued for it.

A
quick review… according to the documentation available, the CAA (which was the
forerunner of the FAA) required a NOTAM, an announcement about the Mogul
flights because these long trains of balloons, rawin radar targets and other
equipment could reach 600 feet long. If these balloon arrays drifted into the
clouds, then aircraft could conceivably fly into them causing an accident.
Flight crews had to know what was out there and the NOTAMs were a way of
telling them that these flying monstrosities were one of those aerial hazards they
might encounter (and yes, I used the word monstrosities on purpose to annoy
some of you).

I
wanted to see what the Mogul team had to say about the balloon arrays and how
they were described in the NOTAMs. I have since learned that these arrays were
not all constructed of the same components, something you wouldn’t know just by
looking at the skeptical arguments (and something that I’ll explore in a later
post). Documentation showed that the arrays sometimes differed from one another
in significant ways and that in some cases there were no rawin targets included
at all. Flight No. 5 had no rawin radar targets, the configuration for Flight
No. 7 had no long string of balloons one above the next but clusters of
balloons and Flight No. 10 (July 5,1947) used a polyethylene balloon as a
lifter rather than the smaller neoprene balloons.

But
I digress…

So,
I spent about a year and a half chasing the NOTAMs, using the Internet,
telephone and the snail mail. I contacted regional offices and the FAA in
Washington, D.C. asking if NOTAMs had been archived at some point and where
that archive might be. I expected to find little or nothing because NOTAMs
aren’t of great historical significance, and the information in them is quite
perishable. They might tell you a runway was closed for repairs or a lighting
system was down at an airport. When the situation changed a new NOTAM would be
issued sort of cancelling the last, or the NOTAM would expire and the document
tossed away.

I
found no repository. The only place I haven’t heard much from is the FAA office
in El Paso where the Mogul NOTAMs were issued, other than to learn they don’t
have anything obvious available. There might be something filed away somewhere,
or at one of the regional airports around El Paso, or more likely, some airport
around Alamogordo might have a file laying around with something in it… though
I doubt it.

So
now that I tire of the game of ignoring the skeptics about this, I reveal the
answer they so patiently have demanded (did you notice the disconnect here, patiently
demanded… can you actually do that?)

Even
though it is a red herring and of no importance, I reveal that I learned there
is no repository and apparently are no records of the NOTAMs for the Mogul
flights.

And
now for the dog that didn’t bark…

How
do I know that there was no NOTAM for Flight No. 4? Charles Moore, in a letter
dated August 10, 1995 and sent to New Mexico Representative Steven Schiff, told
us. He wrote, “Since we launched from just within
the restricted air space associated with the White Sands Proving ground and
expected the balloons to rise high above the civil air space, we did not notify
the CAA in El Paso.”

Now why in the world would Moore
write such a thing as Schiff began his investigation? What would be his
motivation? What does it say about the mythical Flight No. 4?

I’ll let you all ponder that, but I
think the answer is fairly obvious. I’ll simply ask, “Why bring it up at all?”

Monday, July 15, 2013

The
2013 Roswell Festival celebrating the 66th anniversary of the UFO
crash has come and gone (and I will note here that to appease the skeptics, I
probably should have said alleged UFO crash). Held, as normal over the Fourth
of July Weekend and sponsored by the International UFO Museum and Research Center,
there was a full slate of speakers and presentations that covered the whole
gamut of UFOs including a slight foray into science fiction.

On
the science fiction side there was Tom Kirkbride, who is becoming a regular
feature at the Festival. He is the author of the Gamadin books that he says
evolved from a love of science fiction and his desire to write a “character”
driven adventure for young adults. It is a series for boys that will appeal to
girls, at least according to the promotional displays around Kirkbride.

Sharon
King also writes science fiction for a younger crowd. Her latest book is Oops was Bullied? This is the story of a
tiny alien named Oops and the Earth girl who befriends her. King said that her
ideas were inspired by an earlier visit to the Roswell area.

At
the other end of the spectrum, there were those who are big with the UFO crowd
and who have made the rounds at various UFO functions. Most popular of those

Travis Walton 2012

who are involved with alien abduction was Travis Walton. I was told that his
books are difficult to keep stocked in the Museum’s bookstore because of his
popularity. Walton’s tale of being hit by a beam of light from an alien craft
and his captivity for five days seems to resonate with the crowd. In the times
I’ve met him, he has always seemed to be somewhat understated, meaning I guess,
a little reserved or quiet but adamant about what he had seen and what he had
experienced.

The
interesting thing here is that those who were with him that night have remained
steadfast in their support of their story and their observations which
certainly suggest Walton had undergone a truly strange experience. After so
many years, had this been a hoax, you would have expected some cracks in the
story. The best that can be said is that Steve Pierce told Philip Klass it was
a hoax, but that whole episode was covered last year in my interview with
Pierce.

Kathleen
Marden, Betty Hill’s niece, was there as well. She seems to take a more
scientific approach to alien abduction than most, searching for ways to verify
the experiences of those others and to build a file of corroborative evidence.
She attempts to look at some of what I think of as the “hidden facts” about
abduction such as the blood types of those who have been abducted. If there is
an anomaly, meaning for example, that a certain group of people with these
hidden attributes are abducted more frequently than those who are not, this
information might tell us something about alien abduction. These could be
things such as blood type or those who are left-handed, as just two examples.

Derrel
Sims, who has billed himself as the “Alien Hunter,” after missing last year was
back this year. He hosted a number of workshops that dealt with alien a

Derrel Sims 2011

bduction
and his views on the subject.

One
of the things covered this year was the Citizen Hearing in Washington, D.C.
Both Stan Friedman and Don Schmitt, who were in Washington for that Hearing,
discussed what had gone on there, the format used, and the outcome of that
event. As I have mentioned here a number of times, I thought the event was well
done, seemed to gain some support from those who usually mock anything UFO
related (meaning, for example, that the New
York Times report on the Hearing was favorable rather than slanted against
it simply because it dealt with alien visitation).

Quite
naturally, there were panels on the Roswell UFO crash that included Schmitt and
Friedman, but also Frank Kimbler and this year Jesse Marcel, Jr. Of all those
on the panel, Jesse was the only one to have lived the event and held some of
the actual debris.

Kimbler
enjoyed a little fame in the last year when his discoveries out on the Brazel
ranch site were featured on the National Geographic channel’s Chasing UFOs.

Frank Kimbler

Kimbler had talked of
finding some buttons in the field that were of military origin. The Chasing UFOs crowd found a button as
well, but it was from a Class A uniform, and not military fatigues as the
buttons found by Kimbler were. That the fatigue buttons were metallic suggested
they were old enough to have been dropped by soldiers cleaning the field in
1947… the button found by the Chasing
UFOs crew was simply not old enough to have been dropped in 1947. History
got in the way to prove that the Chasing
UFOs button was not old enough.

Crowds
this year seemed to be larger than those in the past and it might be there has
been a lot of UFO coverage lately or it might simply have been the way the
Fourth of July holiday worked out. Many took the Friday after the Fourth off
which gave them an extra travel day… and some, it seems, took most of that week
off to stretch their vacation days. Whatever the reason, more people were there
this year than last (when the holiday didn’t really help.)

Whatever
the reason for the increase in attendance that increase will surely result in a
festival next year. Anything that alerts the public to the events in New Mexico
in 1947 can’t be a bad thing, and the diversity of the programs and the presenters
certainly represent a wide range of views.

Thursday, July 11, 2013

I
was doing a video lap the other day, which is what I call channel surfing. I
found a documentary about Roswell and they were conducting an experiment to
recreate the Mogul balloon array and then see what would happen when it fell
back to earth. They kept the balloons tethered, I don’t think the array was
quite as large as those run in 1947, and they shot down the balloons with a
pellet gun. Their debris field was small, there were large amounts of twine or
rope that held the array together and the radar targets were not particularly
degraded.

Or,
in other words, it didn’t match the descriptions of the debris or the field given
by those who saw it in 1947.

But
that wasn’t what annoyed me about this. It was the idea that the Mogul
explanation had enough merit that the producers of the show thought that they
needed to attempt to replicate it. It was that anyone who was paying attention still
thought that the Mogul explanation was viable based on the documented evidence
that is available to us now.

Crary on the left.

So,
let’s just start that whole debate again by saying, there was no Mogul Flight
No. 4. Dr. Albert Crary’s field notes and his diary entries are quite clear on
the point. Flight No. 4 was cancelled… end of story. Period.

Okay,
end of story, semi-colon.

Here’s
the deal. Crary made it clear that Flight No. 4 had been cancelled. He said
that specifically and the other historical evidence backs it up. The first
flight noted in New Mexico was Flight No. 5, and that was recovered. Had there
been a Flight No. 4 as successful as Charles Moore claimed it was, (with all
his nonsensical but very extensive research conducted in the 1990s using winds
aloft data from 1947), it would have been noted as the first flight.

Moore in Socorro.

The
second notation for June 4, the date of the cancelled Flight No. 4, was that
they had flown a cluster of balloons, with a sonobuoy in the afternoon. Crary
only told us that they had good reception on the ground for the radio signal
but not so good on the B-17 that was also used in their attempts to detect a
signal. But he did tell us what that flight was and it did not have the rawin
targets. It was just a cluster of balloons and a sonobuoy.

A
cluster of balloons is not the same as a full Mogul array. Crary made the
distinction in his field notes about this, when all of that material is
reviewed. It is quite clear what happened. There was no Flight No. 4 to drop
debris up on the Foster ranch, no Flight No. 4 that would have presented a
threat to aerial navigation, hence no NOTAM filed for the flight, and nothing to
indicate that the balloons headed off to the northeast, flying over those
distinctively named towns that Charles Moore remembered all those years later
to prove that Flight No. 4 not

A Mogul launch for the Press.

only existed, but had flown off in the proper
direction.

We
have been pussy-footing around this for years, allowing those who wish to force
their views on us set the ground rules, pick the fight, and then we sit back
and listen to what they have to say even when that position is indefensible.
The field notes and diary make it clear and I do not understand why that
clarity is being obscured nor do I understand why there are those who refuse to
understand it…

Well,
that’s not true. Without Flight No. 4, Mogul fails as an answer. It cannot
account for the debris because it never left Alamogordo. If there was no Flight
No. 4, then Moore’s role as the man who launched the Roswell case falters and
fails and the Mogul experiments are reduced to an attempt to spy on the
Soviets. He doesn’t find his name in the newspapers and he isn’t visited by
those researching the case and he certainly doesn’t get to appear on TV or
participate in a book.

So,
there was no Flight No. 4, and I’m not even going to bother with the argument
that Mogul wasn’t all that secret… with pictures of it published in the
newspapers on July 10, 1947, and the name being used in all sorts of
non-classified publications which eliminates another of the legs for the Mogul
explanation.

My
point is that we shouldn’t even be dealing with this anymore just as we are no
longer dealing with a stray rocket or missile (and yes there is a difference)
from White Sands, an experimental aircraft accident, an aircraft accident
involving an atomic weapons, or a bunch of other things such as John Keel’s
Fugo Balloons that have been ruled out by evidence. Mogul should join those and
we just shouldn’t entertain arguments about this any longer.

Mogul
is a distraction that does not work. Each time someone proposes it, we should
tell them the flight was cancelled and demand they provide evidence that it
wasn’t. We should tell them that a cluster of balloons is not a Mogul flight
and that the debris found on the Foster ranch was simply too wide spread to be
that from Mogul let alone a cluster of balloons with a sonobuoy.

We
tell them Mogul doesn’t work and if they have no evidence for it, then give it
up. Find something that does in fact work, and let us see that evidence.

Tuesday, July 09, 2013

A
few weeks back, I mentioned a UFO sighting from the USS Helm that had been reported in the MUFON UFO Journal in July 1983. This was of a disk-shaped object
that had circled the Guadalcanal invasion fleet and had been fired on by a
number of the ships. The UFO reacted to the hostile fire and sped off.

USS Helm

I
mentioned that on the dates the source, who was not identified, gave, there was
nothing in the deck logs to support the report but allowed how he might have
gotten the dates wrong. I suggested that a more thorough search be attempted
simply to be sure that we had the facts straight.

First,
let me point out that in 1983 we didn’t have the research sources available
that we have today. I can go on the Internet and usually in a matter of
minutes, if not find an answer, I can find out how to get an answer. As an
aside, just today, through email, I received an answer to an inquiry that I
would never had been able to make in 1983, simply because everything seems to
be on the web… more on that in another post.

A
search of the deck logs of the USS Helm
for November and December 1941; and for July 1942 through November 1942 has
been completed. A day-to-day search for anything that remotely resembles the
story first reported in 1983 has failed. The closest we can come is to an entry on
July 6, 1942 (a Monday if anyone cares) that at 0325 (or 3:25 in the morning),
those on watch “Sighted steady white light bearing 061 [degrees], distance
about 10 miles; unidentified.”

Deck Log, July 6, 1942

Not
really much here and no reason to assume the light was anything other than
something of a terrestrial nature. Granted, showing a light in a combat zone
with all kinds of trigger-happy people around, on both sides, isn’t very smart
but there is no reason to assume anything else about it. This light didn’t buzz
the ship, or the fleet, and no one fired on it.

While
it seems that the USS Helm was
involved in the Guadalcanal invasion in the beginning of August 1942, there is
nothing to suggest they fired, or anyone else fired, on a disk-shaped object at
any time in August. And there was nothing to suggest the incident took place in
October 1942 either. The USS Helm
wasn’t near Guadalcanal but was operating off the coast of Australia.

With
no documentation to support the tale, it must be rejected. We have no source that
has been named, we have two separate dates for the event, and we have now
reviewed the deck logs of the ship involved and found no support for the tale
on those dates. A search of the deck logs covering several months has failed to
find anything even remotely like the story told. The only conclusion to be
drawn is that this event, as described, did not happen… and since it was not
reported to anyone prior to 1983 or more than forty years later, there is no
reason to accept it today. This should be removed from the list of UFO
sightings.

Let
me add this. I can see no blame to attach to Paul C. Cerny or Robert Neville
because, in 1983, they didn’t have the resources to take this to the end. I’m
not even sure the deck logs would have been available to civilian researchers
then and if they were I’m not sure what you would have had to do to access them.
Today, we all have access to a wide range of documentation from all kinds of
sources and we should use them to verify our reports. We ignore the
documentation at our peril.

Friday, July 05, 2013

Back
some time ago I put together a long article about Phil Klass and some of the
dirty tricks he pulled on UFO researchers, investigators and witnesses. In the
course of that article I suggested that Klass sometimes provided explanations
for sightings that were not in keeping with the evidence available. The case in
point was Klass’ claim that Frederick Valentich was a drug smuggler because he
had four life preservers on his aircraft. Like many others, I never understood
how you could make the leap from the number of life preservers on an aircraft
to drug smuggling, but in the world of UFOs, if you can’t fight the evidence,
then smear those associated with the case.

Some
in the skeptical world were not satisfied with my response that Russ Estes had
interviewed Klass a number of years ago and was told the smuggling theory by
Klass. Since I didn’t have the direct quote, they wished to reject the
information, though Klass’ assertion was widely reported in various other
forums. In the world of the skeptic, you just never step on the toes of a
fellow skeptic. You support his point of view to ridiculous lengths.

I
mention all this because the Valentich sighting has popped up again and Klass’
claim about him has surfaced again. This time links of various statements made
by Klass have been posted so that all can listen to his words and decide if the
claim is outrageous, a distortion of the situation or if there might be some
validity in it.

You
can now download the debate between Don Ecker and Klass in which Klass makes
the claim again. This is the whole thing so that you can listen to it in the
context of that debate. It can be found at: